What is your purpose, your mission? It’s a difficult question to answer, but when you take the time to fully examine and create your personal mission state you will be empowered with a guide that you can use to get your bearings in life, in your career and in your relationships.
Just as a company’s mission statement defines it’s core purpose - the reason for the company’s existence - a personal mission statement defines the reason you operate the way you do. An effective personal mission statement is inspiring and easily understood by yourself and others in your life.
Five years ago I had no clue how to begin a personal mission statement. I had this vague idea that creating one would be a good thing, because at the time I started writing it I didn’t feel like I had a clear direction for my life and myself. So I sat down and struggled with writing one and after many revisions finally arrived at my personal mission statement:
“I will work in an environment where I can learn and expand my skills while making a difference to those with which I work, and in the business I conduct.
I will treat all that I encounter fairly and justly, in a manner in which I myself would wish to be treated.
I will commit myself fully in relationships with those I love.
I will work at tasks that I enjoy and excite me, to achieve financial freedom. This freedom will allow me to pursue my desires to work with technology, and to pursue my entrepreneurial spirit with new ideas and business ventures. This freedom will allow me to take care of, and spend time with my family.”
Over the last five years I’ve tried to reflect on my mission statement at least monthly, and I’ve made it a point to consult it when making major decisions.
I’ve also learned to share it with the people in my life who can have a dramatic impact on my performance and my life. And this is the big secret I’ve learned over the years; if you’re not sharing your personal mission statement with your mentor and the people in your influence network, you’re missing out on a lot of the power of having a personal mission statement in the first place.
For about three years I kept my personal mission statement hidden from just about everyone. I looked at it often, and I used it to help guide my decision, but I didn’t share with others my mission. Finally about two years ago I made a point to share my personal mission statement with one of the senior executives at my company. I finally decided to share my personal mission statement because the individual with whom I shared it was a huge supporter of personal growth and development.
Once I shared it, and I wasn’t laughed at for my mission statement, I immediately felt more comfortable sharing it with others. As I did, my circle of influential people grew. At the same time, I helped provide direction to a few people around me to write their own personal mission statement.
As I shared my mission, I found that more opportunities that were extremely closely aligned with my personal mission statement appeared out of nowhere. The “vibe” I was communicating out was coming back and providing me with benefits that were multiplied many times over.
Today there is no reason to not have a personal mission statement! There are numerous resources on the Internet and in books that will walk you along the process of creating your own personal mission statement.
There are some excellent worksheets in Tommy Newberry’s book “Success Is Not An Accident
” that will help you with your creation of a personal mission statement. Franklin-Covey offers a free, web-based interactive mission statement builder on their web site. Steve Pavlina also has an excellent article on his blog titled, “How to discover your life purpose in about 20 minutes” It’s not a personal mission statement guide per say, but if you complete the exercise you’ll have a better understanding of whether your mission statement is aligned with your purpose.
If you don’t have a personal mission statement I would challenge you to spend at least a half-hour working on one for yourself. Here’s a quick way to write a personal mission statement:
1) Start writing all the things that best capture your personal values and beliefs; in this step completeness is more important than making it “sound good”.
2) Cull your best ideas down into your first draft of your personal mission statement.
3) Put this draft away for a few days! You want to let your subconscious mull around your first draft of your mission statement. Let things gel for a few days to a week, don’t consciously think about your personal mission statement. This is the most important step of the process.
4) After about a week pull out your personal mission statement and re-read it. Does it ring true? Does it strike a chord deep inside you? Does is just feel “right”? If yes, great! It’s time to polish it! If no, then go back to the beginning and brainstorm some more.
5) Remember high-school English class and endless re-writing of your papers? It’s time to put that practice to good use by re-writing your personal mission statement until you have a version you’re happy with.
6) Take this semi-final version of your personal mission statement and test it. If you have one, ask your mentor’s opinion of your personal mission statement. Ask close, supportive, friends of their opinion of your personal mission statement. Put your feelings on hold during this process and really look for and accept constructive criticism of your personal mission statement. This is the major benefit of having a mentor or personal development network you trust.
7) Take all of the feedback and look at your personal mission statement in the light of any recommendations or comments you’ve received. Make any changes you feel are needed. This should be your final draft and the end result should be your personal mission statement; congratulations!
Once you have your personal mission statement finished, commit to yourself that you will regularly review it and consult it before making major life decisions to make sure those decisions are aligned with your mission and your beliefs.
I guarantee you that you’ll see positive changes in your life as you spend more and more time integrating your personal mission statement into your routine. As you put it out to others, you’ll start to see new opportunities present themselves that just seem perfect for you!
December 6th, 2005
Email is the killer application of the Internet; it allows near-instant communication, it allows easy group collaboration, and it’s an efficient way for the top brass of a company to keep their ear turned towards the entire enterprise.
Email is also not as distracting as a ringing phone. When someone calls you, it’s interrupting what you’re doing. When an email arrives you can usually continue working and check the message when it’s convenient for you. That’s why so many people love email, and that’s one of its greatest powers.
And Microsoft is trying to screw everything up!
A few months back our office upgraded to Outlook 2003 to go along with an Exchange upgrade. I must admit I enjoy some of the changes in Outlook 2003, but it has a new feature that really drives me crazy.
When you get an email message Outlook 2003 pops up a semi-transparent window in the lower right-hand corner of your desktop for about 7 seconds. This window contains the name of the message sender and the subject line of the message. If you put your mouse over the window it turns fully opaque and if you click on the window you’re whisked away from whatever you were doing to read the message.
If you’re like me, and that pop-up is from your boss or maybe someone with a question about an urgent project, it’s very tempting to let yourself get distracted, click the message, and jump to another task. And that makes it very tough to get productive and stay productive.
What’s the easy solution? Many productiviy gurus recommend only launching your email program once or twice a day and only checking your messages during these times. This may be the best way to make sure that you’re in control of your email and not vice-versa, but I don’t have the luxury of checking and responding to my email only once or twice a day. I don’t have to be on top of it minute-by-minute, but I need to be responsive at least hourly. And I’m willing to guess than unless you’re in a pretty high position within your company, you’re in a similar situation too.
So how do you take back some control over your email? Turn off all the distractions! Though the pop-ups and new message sounds are enabled by default, you can turn them off. Here’s how:
- In Outlook 2003 click the menu
"Tools"
- Choose the menu option
"Options".
- Click on the button
"E-mail Options".
- Click on the button
"Advanced E-mail Options"
- Un-check the options
"Play a sound", "Briefly change the mouse cursor", and "Display a New Mail Desktop Alert...".
I like to leave the option "Show an envelope icon in the notification area" option turned on. That way I can glance down and see if new email awaits. It also serves as a reminder for me to check my messages about once an hour, but die-hard productivity fans may want to turn the envelope icon off too.
While I was typing this article I received 5 email messages. Fortunately I didn’t notice because I had these notifications turned off. Instead of being tempted to jump away from writing this article, I was able to finish and then check my messages.
Changing these settings allows me go about my work without being interrupted by “dings” and pop-up windows, and it lets me take some control back over how I let (or in this case, don’t let) others interrupt me via email.
December 5th, 2005
I’ve been intrigued by Merlin Mann’s Hipster PDA for some time. I tried building and carrying one myself, but I found I wasn’t really using it in a way that suited my own note taking and “next action” capturing style.
I don’t work well with discreet items all on their own note card and when I tried to capture more than one “action” per note card I found that didn’t work well for me either! I liked the idea of a low-tech solution to capturing my random thoughts and urgent action items, but the HPDA didn’t seem to be the best fit for me.
So I started thinking about what was a good fit, and I realized that keeping a list on paper was how I worked best, and making something that was easily carried was most important to me. Around the time I formalized my wants, I happened across a web site for the “Cheapster PDA” - a single 8.5″ x 11″ piece of paper folded into a little booklet. I immediately whipped out a sheet of paper, folded it up and thought, “The form is good, but how can I improve on this?”
I decided that I wanted some structure to my booklet. A place to keep my list of actions, a place for free-form notes and maybe even a place for a schedule would be all items I would want to incorporate. After some tinkering around with page layout software I came up with a design that suited my desires and put it to the test. It was a single 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of paper run through my laser printer and then folded up. It worked great.
I dubbed it the micro life organizer; “MiLO” for short. I printed a handful out and gave them to my wife and some select friends for testing. The feedback was positive, they all liked the form and the usefulness of the MiLO! After some feedback, and tweaking to suit my own needs, I decided to roll out the MiLO to the Internet for all to use.
When the MiLO is all folded up it’s 2.75″ wide and 4.25″ tall, only a little bigger than a credit card. It takes about 40 seconds to fold the MiLO into booklet form and all you need to make one is a laser or ink-jet printer that can print to within a quarter inch of the edge of the page.
There are five lined pages, complete with check boxes, two pages are blank for free-form notes and the back page is a week-in-a-view calendar (Sunday - Saturday).
I find that I can easily get a normal week’s usage out of one MiLO, and during really busy weeks I might need a second MiLO by the middle of the week. It’s also setup so if you’re a devotee of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system you can assign a context at the top of each “action” page (for example; @work, @calls, @home, @internet, @someday).
I’m hoping that other people will find the MiLO useful too which is why I’m posting it here. You can download a PDF that you can print out for yourself: Download MiLO2.0.pdf (version 2.0) here.
PLEASE NOTE: If you’re printing this PDF with Windows, make sure to select “Page Scaling = None” on the print options when you print out a MiLO or Acrobat Reader will shrink the MiLO down by a few percent and it will not fold properly. This is one of the biggest frustrations people using Windows will have printing out a MiLO for themselves.
The MiLO is available free of charge for anyone to use. I hope you find it as useful as I do, it’s an easy way to keep a lot of items handy without needing a lot of space to do it. If you find it useful, please leave a comment and let me know!
December 3rd, 2005
